Our Daily Bleg: Book-Club Questions Needed

My book club is reading Freakonomics as our selection of the month and we’re meeting on Wednesday. It’s my selection, so I’m responsible for bringing 10 questions that’ll prompt discussion about the book.

Based on the argument that broke out at our last meeting when I merely mentioned the idea behind the abortion/crime bits of the book, I don’t imagine I will actually need 10 questions to keep the discussion moving for two hours (more likely, I will need a very large whip to keep the members from maiming each other), but still, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask the readers of Freakonomics if they have any discussion questions they’d use to prompt conversation about the book.

I’m betting that at least some of the members of your book club are parents. Why not ask them what they thought about the parenting portion of the book? Do they agree with the book’s assertions or disagree with them? Are they open to the possibility that these assertions might be true, even though the implications could be hurtful?

Regarding the parenting section of the book (and allowing for the fact that the abortion/crime rate portion is even more incendiary), perhaps ask the group to discuss whether the book’s focus on scholastic results (and what effect parents have on them) resonated with them or not? I know that I found that part fascinating, but at the end of it, I thought, “But wait a minute! As a parent, do I really place that much importance on little Bobo’s marks when thinking about my own contributions? My value as a parent is in so many other areas that these results don’t speak to me all that much.” But that’s just me.

I would ask “what other decisions and issues of life could you apply the Freakonomics-style practical/entertaining/intellectual integration type of thought to in order to get a better understanding and better results?”

And.

“What policies should the government alter in regard to the studies and methods revealed in Freakonomics?”

Here is the question I would ask:
Regarding the chapter on abortion and crime, how does your belief about the status of a fetus affect your interpretation of the data. As far as I can tell, one’s position on the moral status of abortion usually exerts a strong influence on how persuasive one will find Levitt’s data. But, of course, the relationship between crime trends and abortion trends is irrelevant to the question of whether a fetus is a human life (as Levitt points out in the book). If we as readers cannot disentangle the moral question about abortion from the empirical question about the robustness of data, what does that tell us about our other beliefs? Are we as open-minded as we think we are or do we tend to filter the facts, dismissing those we disagree with and latching on to those that are compatible with our world view?